North and South Korea have tried to make peace before — and they could do so again

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il shakes hands with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung as the latter arrives at Pyongyang's Sunan airport June 13, 2000.
Pool/Reuters

Despite the tension in the Korean Peninsula, North Korea and South Korea have made important strides towards peace in the last several decades.

North Korea has remained deeply insecure and volatile due to their fear of United States' pressure and relationship with South Korea.

This feeling of insecurity makes future peace talks more unlikely, but South Koreans hope to resume border-crossing and humanitarian efforts.

With tension on the Korean Peninsula higher than it's been for years and fears are surging on all sides that a full-blown conflict is nearer than ever.

But as the war of words between Washington and Pyongyang gets ever more lurid, with missile and warhead tests on one side and military exercises and flypasts on the other, it's easy to forget that North and South Korea have made serious efforts to defrost their relationship before.

On July 7 1988, with the Cold War coming to an end, South Korean President Rho Tae-woo announced his plan to "actively promote exchanges of visits between the people of South and North Korea, including politicians, businessmen, journalists, religious leaders, cultural leaders, artists, academics and students".

After their first summit, the South and North Korean governments expanded several cross-border peacebuilding activities, such as humanitarian, development, and economic cooperation, business, and socio-cultural exchanges.

Within a few years, as part of these activities, more than half a million people crossed the border between North and South Korea. Almost 2 million South Korean tourists visited North Korea.

And yet today, the inter-Korean peacebuilding of the 2000s looks like a long-lost dream. What went wrong?

When Japan was defeated in World War II, the Korean independence movement and its provisional government, who had long fought Japanese colonial rule, were not recognised as victors. Instead, the northern half of Korea was put under Soviet control and the south was occupied by the US, effectively dividing the Korean peninsula in two.

The first North Korean leader, Kim Il-sung, seemed convinced he could resolve this division by force, but his attack on South Korea in 1950 and the ensuing Korean War almost cost North Korea its existence. Only Chinese intervention saved it, and the war was suspended (though not ended) by the Armistice Treaty of 1953.

But North Korean memories of how US bombers destroyed their country and how close the US came to using the atomic bomb on North Korea, are still very much alive, and may be stronger after the end of the Cold War.

People watch a TV broadcasting a news report on North Korea firing what appeared to be an intercontinental ballistic missile that landed close to Japan, in Seoul, South Korea, November 29, 2017.
Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

Not backing down

As if to validate the rhetoric of the North Korean regime, the US president, Donald Trump, successfully persuaded South Korea to purchase more American weapons during his recent visit to East Asia. The US and South Korea are planning yet another joint military drill from December 4-8, in which about 230 warfare aircraft will participate in a show of force.

Meanwhile, North Korea fired another ballistic missile on November 28, once again claiming that their development of nuclear and missile technology is not "to pose any threat to any country", but to defend North Korea from the US threat.

Putting aside debate around the nature of the North Korean regime, the insecurity experienced by a conflict party is not a phenomenon unique to the Korean conflict. Several contemporary peace processes, such as the Northern Ireland peace process, show that without addressing the issue of insecurity, any agreement would not be possible.